Books To Read if You Love The Sympathizer

Hailed by critics and writers as powerful, important fiction, Monkey Bridge charts the unmapped territory of the Vietnamese American experience in the aftermath of war. The narrative traverses perilously between worlds past and present, East and West, in two interlocking stories: one, the Vietnamese version of the classic immigrant experience in America, told by a young girl; and the second, a dark tale of betrayal, political intrigue, family secrets, and revenge — her mother’s tale.

One of the funniest books ever written, Joseph Heller’s masterpiece about a bomber squadron in the Second World War’s Italian theater features a gallery of magnificently strange characters seething with comic energy. This fractured anti-epic, with all its aggrieved humanity, has given us the most enduring image we have of modern warfare.

Twenty-eight-year-old Quan has been fighting for the Communist cause in North Vietnam for a decade. Filled with idealism and hope when he first left his village, he now spends his days and nights dodging stray bullets and bombs, foraging scraps of food to feed himself and his men. Then, given the chance to return to his home, Quan undertakes a physical and mental journey that brings him face to face with figures from his past and ultimately to the shattering reality that his innocence has been irretrievably lost in the wake of the war.

A wild, sweeping novel that imagines an alternate secret history of Korea and the traces it leaves on the present — loaded with assassins and mad poets, RPGs and slasher films, pop bands, and the perils of social media.

A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows 12 characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

In this hilariously savage, poignant novel by acclaimed author Katherine Min, a grieving daughter’s revenge on the man who caused her mother’s death sets off a series of unexpected reckonings.

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a 23-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim.

Equal parts crime thriller and family saga, transporting readers from the dusty villages of Uttar Pradesh to the urban energy of New Delhi, Age of Vice is an intoxicating novel of gangsters and lovers, false friendships, forbidden romance, and the consequences of corruption. It is binge-worthy entertainment at its literary best.

A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned — a razor-edged fairy tale from grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.

“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused,” Graham Greene’s narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous “Quiet American.” Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas. Originally published in 1956, The Quiet American is Greene’s classic exploration of love, innocence, and morality in Vietnam.

There’s a fine line between bending the truth and telling bold-faced lies, and Javier Perez is willing to cross it. Victim is a fearless satire about a hustler from the Bronx who sees through the veneer of diversity initiatives and decides to cash in on the odd currency of identity.

A haunting portrait of a young man’s obsession with idealized beauty and his destructive quest to possess it fully — and the book that “established Mishima’s claim as one of the outstanding writers of the world” (The New York Times).

In Native Speaker, author Chang-rae Lee introduces readers to Henry Park. Park’s harsh Korean upbringing has taught him to hide his emotions, to remember everything he learns, and most of all to feel an overwhelming sense of alienation. In other words, it has shaped him as a natural spy. Native Speaker is a story of cultural alienation. It is about fathers and sons, about the desire to connect with the world rather than stand apart from it, about loyalty and betrayal, about the alien in all of us and who we finally are.

In his last completed novel, John le Carré turns his focus to the world that occupied his writing for the past sixty years — the secret world itself. Silverview is the mesmerizing story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. In his inimitable voice John le Carré, the greatest chronicler of our age, seeks to answer the question of what we truly owe to the people we love.

Cleo, scion of a once-prominent Cuban family and a promising young writer in her own right, travels to Spain to collect a prestigious award. There, Cuban expats view her with suspicion — assuming she’s an informant for the Castro regime. To Cleo’s surprise, that suspicion follows her home to Cuba, where she finds herself under constant surveillance by the government. When she meets and falls in love with a Hollywood filmmaker, she discovers her family is not who she thought they were … and neither is the filmmaker.

Lilian Shang, a history professor in Maryland, knew that her father, Gary, had been the most important Chinese spy ever caught in the United States. But when she discovers his diary after the death of her parents, its pages reveal the full pain and longing that his double life entailed — and point to a hidden second family that he’d left behind in China.